Vera Verba

The political season is upon us again, and all sorts of half-truths, mis-statements, and outright lies are filling the air. It’s not hard to get fooled by some of them. After all, the politicians work long and hard to make them effective. You have to deal with them only occasionally, but a politician may spend a thousand hours a year on these little manipulations.

Today I want to focus on one of the greats - the incentive trap.

Imagine that you and twenty other people are all given an Amex number. You can use it for anything you want, and at the end of the month, you divide the bill twenty ways.

Can you imagine how people would use that card after a short time? Someone would start spending big. (After all, he or she can spend a fortune, and still pay only 1/20th of the bill.) Then the rest of you would start spending big, just to protect yourselves. If you’re going to pay a huge bill anyway, you might as well get some value out of it.

This is called an incentive trap, and it is an excellent analogy of how modern governments operate. For example, in my home town, we’ve always had candidates that ran as friends of either the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Poles, the Swedes, the Blacks, the Latinos, or others. Each group elects politicians to look out for their interests - and to grab as much from the treasury as possible.

As long as people vote for someone to “get their share,” politics will be a free-for-all of profligate spending and economic insanity. It is the Amex card trap, writ large.

So, realize that every time a candidate says he’s going to stick up for ANY group, he is also guaranteeing that the pain will keep on coming.

Sure, you can blame the politician, but it is the voters that reward this stupidity. Blame the people. And…

Don’t get fooled again!

PS: I explained this in another way as Mindless Slogan #85: Bringing Home The Bacon. Some day I’ll publish an explanation of how and why this situation developed.